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Re: automake during development


From: Stepan Kasal
Subject: Re: automake during development
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 08:42:37 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.4.1i

Hello.

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 01:14:05PM -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> Automake developers feel that package 
> developers should be more careful/responsible than to build and 
> distribute whatever files happen to be available.

A friend of mine told me that it took him quite a long time until
he realized that the requirement that distributed files have to be
explicitely listed is good.

Back to your question:
"not portable" is not that bad in all contexts.  If the development is
done mostly in environment with GNU make, you can use its wildcard
features for development.  You only have to arrange to switch it off
when release time comes.

Perhaps your configure.ac can contain AM_CONDITIONAL(REQ_GMAKE, true)
during the development, and it'll be changed to false before release.
And Makefile.am would contain two branches.

The portable branch would contain the list of all files.  You would
probably write a script to update the list semi-automatically, but you
would run the script manually, thus keeping an eye on what goes there.

> What you can do is create a utility which is a Makefile.am generator. 

>   Makefile.amt
>                 \
>                   utility --> Makefile.am --> Makefile.in --> Makefile
>                 /
>    source files

If you decide to go this path, there is a better implementation, IMHO;
you can use automake's ``include'' feature.
(gawk-3.1.4/test/Makefile.am can illustrate the technique)

Have a nice day,
        Stepan Kasal




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